Blogroll

Very long URLs sometimes burst out of this content area and bleed across to the column on the right. I say sometimes because Firefox seems to do the right thing and wrap a long URL, whereas Chrome and Safari (and I think IE7) do not.

Note: I first added the bold text to the ‘#content p’ definition so it would apply to any text. However this caused double spacing in listings like the code above and made other posts looked oddly formed with an extra blank link here and there. Using <pre> tags around code could help sort that but it’s extra work and the general extra blank lines here and there would have needed individually sorting too. Ultimately this is a long URLs problem and that’s what I’ve sorted.

On some posts I noticed that the contents of the right column would appear under the content (the middle column). Horrid!

Looking at the CSS of the page as rendered on Firefox and with Web Developer extension – which I don’t know much about and don’t use much – showed that it was there because it was seen as content and not a new div. Old hands will have known this all the time I’m sure. So somehow the Content area was not being closed off as it should.

More poking around and I found the problem was repeatable:

If commenting (in posts) was switched on then this did not happen.

If there were no comments and commenting is closed then no problem.

If there are comments and commenting is then closed then there was a problem

The problem turned out to be a lack of a closing </div> in those circumstances – the logic was flawed.

To fix, go into comments.php

Find this code (note I have collapsed spaces from the start of lines):

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>
<?php if ('open' == $post->comment_status) : ?>
<!-- If comments are open, but there are no comments. -->
<?php else : // comments are closed ?>
<!-- If comments are closed. -->
<p>Comments are closed.</p></div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

and remove the bold </div> to give this:

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>
<?php if ('open' == $post->comment_status) : ?>
<!-- If comments are open, but there are no comments. -->
<?php else : // comments are closed ?>
<!-- If comments are closed. -->
<p>Comments are closed.</p>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

Also towards the bottom of the file find this

<?php do_action(‘comment_form’, $post->ID); ?>

</form></div>

and remove the bold </div> to give this:

<?php do_action(‘comment_form’, $post->ID); ?>

</form>

And the last change is to add a </div> as the very last line in the file, which should then look like this:

<?php endif; // if you delete this the sky will fall on your head ?>
</div>

As delivered the words in the left sidebar don’t line up with the text in the header and the footer – they are more to the left and it tends to gove a bulging feeling rather then the neatness and order which I think the design is all about.

I fixed this as follows…

In WordPress Admin you need to edit style.css. Go into Presentation/Theme Editor and click on Stylesheet. Scroll down and in the Left Sidebar section find:

With a new title font selected I created the graphic I needed in Photoshop as a gif:

But how to use in the theme? I like the idea of image replacement – where you have the title specified as text – great for search engines and for people who surf without images on, but I have never used the technique. Here is how I got things sorted here – i don’t claim any of its optimal, but it seems to work well enough I think.

MezzoBlue has a page called Revised Image Replacement and it goes through a number of ways of doing it. Based on that I went for the Gilder/Levin solution….

1. Put the new graphic in your wp-content/themes/whitespace/images directory using ftp

2 In WordPress Admin you need to edit style.css. Go into Presentation/Theme Editor and click on Stylesheet. Scroll down and in the header section find:

There is one new line in #headerleft – the position: relative; This is really important and without it I was seeing most of the pages wrecked and one big link. For an explanation of why the position relative is needed see this discussion on DigitalPoint.

Also a brand new #headerleft span definition is added in. The background-position: -3px 24px; will probably be different for you – its what I need to make my new title graphic end up in just the right place.

With the changes done click the Update File button

3) In WordPress Admin you need to edit the Header. Go into Presentation/Theme Editor and click on Header.

4) Now go look at your weblog and you should see the new title replace the old text. Just tweak background position coordinates until it sits where you want.

Browser Checks
I tried this on Firefox 2, IE7 and Safari 3 on a PC and it works fine. However on IE7 the hot link curser does not show up when you role over the graphic (it does on Firefox and Safari), however clicking on the graphic has the desired effect and all browsers take you back to the Home page. Those 3 browsers are good enough for me. However for an exhaustive look at these techniques across all try this piece at Ryznardesign. I have to say though that its really above me in its exhaustive detail. Read more

I obviously much the like the theme I’m using (Whitespace) but I didn’t like the original standard heading text – the ‘BruceMarriott.com’ top left. As standard on a PC it looked like this:

I wanted a nice font to give some colour and personality to an otherwise cooly clean look. The place I go to look at fonts is MyFonts. The great thing is you can test fonts by typing in a short prase (like BruceMarriott.com) and see what it looks like.

However many fonts look really cool on their own but then don’t fit with what you have – at least my non-designer eye can’t see how it will work.

So what I did was take a copy of the theme as delivered, pasted it into Photoshop and then, using the Myfonts test facility I produced likely good looking titles which I again copied and pasted (using layers) to see just how they would look on my page as is. (btw I grab copies off screen using 123 Screen Capture Pro – I don’t use it so often but when I do it always just works – hooray). Great – I went through 20 fonts I thought looked cool and about 12 of them just didn’t work at all. In the end there were 3 I thought nice and I’ve gone with Sphinx RR Inline.

Distinctive, makes a mark, but not too heavy and a bit theatrical I think.

Having chosen the font actually using it as proved fun – but that’s another blog entry.

Welcome to my blog – I’ve long wanted one but wanted it to look like I wanted and to be extensible and tweakable and sexy etc. Of course all this is a search for perfection and merely stops it happening!

So here it is as it is and I will tweak and add as I go along.

And finally all those little things I kept thinking “Must put this on a blog” can be done. In wrestling with technology and life etc I often search for solutions and it’s as often as not a blog offers some thoughts on the way forward and if I have any hope its that some of the future posts here help others.

I also see it as a repository for odds and sods that I will probably forget myself otherwise. And of course it would be good to have a place for pics and the stuff of life.

In an earlier life I loved doing deals and now I represent some professionals involved in dance. They concentrate on the art they love and I concentrate on achieving fair terms and conditions for them. More on the LiftedLeg page.